With the development of the Internet technologies, more and more applications have emerged over the Internet. To meet the requirements of the diversified applications, the network distribution technology based on the principle of Peer to Peer (P2P) network has been applied to a great extent. At present, in addition to ordinary network user computers acting as user nodes, control nodes and supernodes also need to be configured in a computer network based on the P2P technology. The control node functions to establish and carry out a control strategy, and control and manage the network through the supernodes. The supernode functions to particularly implement the management and control over the user nodes under the management of the control node.
In general, the supernode is implemented by a user computer having abundant resources. Therefore, how to select a supernode from numerous user computers and configure the same has become a key task that influences the function of a computer network. The issue regarding how to select and configure a supernode also exists in wireless communication networks.
At present, some solutions have been proposed to the above issue.
Chinese patent application No. 200710003320.2 in the name of Huawei Technology Co., Ltd., titled “Method, Device and System for Electing Supernode and Searching Network Node and Resource”, discloses a method in which an ordinary node in a network compares the value of a performance parameter with a threshold specified in the conditions that an ordinary node can be a supernode (for example, CPU frequency and memory capacity, network width for the node, network delay of the node, total number of other nodes interacting with the node, online time of the node, total traffic with other nodes per minute, and average CPU utilization ratio and average memory utilization ratio during a predetermined period of time), and sends a message indicating that the node becomes a supernode to other nodes interacting with the node, when it is determined that the performance of the node meets the conditions that an ordinary node can be a supernode. This solution mainly takes into account the performance parameters of the node, but not the interactions between the node and other nodes. If the supernode needs to manage other user nodes, relative long time and path may be required for finding a corresponding user node, resulting in a too low working efficiency of the supernode.
Chinese patent application No. 200710176639.5 in the name of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, titled “Method for Selecting P2P Network Supernode and Searching Resources Taking into Account Importance of Node”, discloses a method including calculating importance of each node in a computing network from the number of neighboring nodes to the node and the importance of each of the neighboring nodes, and selecting a supernode according to the importance. Because the interactions among the network nodes change constantly in practice, for a dynamic network, this solution can only adjust the importance values of the nodes in the same time interval and select a supernode according to the adjusted importance values of the nodes. If the network changes faster (or slower), this solution can not shorten (or prolong) the adjustment period of the importance values of the nodes according to the actual network conditions, resulting in a low reactivity of the system to a change of the network, or greatly increased traffic in the network.
Chinese patent application No. 200610081402.4 in the name of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, titled “Method for Implementing P2P Network with Dynamic Cell Allocation Technique”, discloses a systemic method for exchanging and sharing information based on a P2P network, in which all users are managed based on dynamic cell allocation, a cell consists of ordinary nodes and is managed by an advanced node, and a supernode manages a certain number of advanced nodes. The size of a cell (i.e. the number of ordinary nodes in the cell) is set upon system initialization and is adjusted dynamically according to the total number of nodes in the cell. This solution does not take into account the interactions among all nodes in the network. When a change occurs in the interactions among the nodes, the cell allocation for users and the supernode selection can not be adjusted dynamically with the change in the actual network conditions, thus limiting the working efficiency of the supernode, and making it possible that the supernode can only implement management and control over user nodes with a relatively long searching time and path.
The same shortcoming of the above solutions lies in that they do not implement the following: dividing the network nodes into a number of node clusters according to the actual interactions among all the nodes in the network, and selecting nodes that have more resources and more interactions with other nodes from each node cluster as supernodes, which implements particular control and management over other nodes in the user node swarm or cluster to which it belongs, under the unified control of the control node. The so-called node cluster consists of a plurality of network nodes that have close interactions with one another.
When a supernode implements particular control and management over other nodes according to the above prior art solutions, the traffic will increase substantially. Moreover, the acquiring period of the interactions among the network nodes, the division and adjustment periods of the node clusters and the supernode selection can not be adjusted dynamically with a change in the actual network conditions. Therefore, how to improve the existing solutions of selecting and configuring supernodes in a network has become a new task for those skilled in the art.